


Dread in the devotion

by Artemis_Crimson



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Eldritch Abominations, F/M, Garrus Vakarian’s Inconvenient Fear Kink, N7 Day, and what to do when they're your fucking girlfriend, the character death is Shepards and she gets better, the teen is for it being wee bit heavy for g
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-08
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2021-01-25 06:17:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21351616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artemis_Crimson/pseuds/Artemis_Crimson
Summary: In which the reapers seem awful familiar the more Garrus thinks about it
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	Dread in the devotion

**Author's Note:**

> FUCK YES GOT IT OUT ON TIME

Garrus is hit by the fact that Shepard is just way too _much_ to be something natural at several points in his long illustrious career of seeing some frankly surreal shit. The amount of strange things she insisted on doing for others would be bad enough but no, her absurd and much abused gift for going the extra mile meant that this wasn’t it.  
The first time was almost three years ago on the Citadel where they’d first met and whatever other plans fate had been thinking of for him went out the window with all the grace of the interstellar leap they’d just made in the Mako. He wasn’t fixing that. Then Shepard just talked Saren Arterius into blowing out his own damned brains for the greater good without so much as a warning, didn’t even have time to process it before they fought his twitching cyborg corpse but okay. Cool. Whatever. He’d seen Shepard pull off some frankly astonishing feats of diplomatic bullshit at this point and while it was breathtaking he could deal. Definitely.  
Shepard had been crushed under a pillar and he didn’t even have time to properly process it. As soon as he considered the fact that she might be dead the giant fucking stone pillars started to shift and she’d risen from her grave like something he didn’t, didn’t even think any language had words for. Stone crumbled out of her way and for a perfect moment haloed in starlight she was invincible.__

_ __ _

_ __ _

Later when they’d split ways so she could run stupid missions and he could arrest stupider criminals Garrus had taken time and learned more than his fractured two paragraphs worth of English and would find okay substitutes for words that couldn’t exist. Words like ‘holy’ and ‘Archangel’. (In the end of his future he’d meet a soldier out of time who called her an avatar, it was close but even being a puppet of victory just didn’t seem to cut it.)

As for now he is still in the dirty warrens of Omega where he’d helplessly tries to bludgeon poetry out of insomnia and a cause out of grief. The latest and greatest flimsy collection of syllables to define her by had been spirit. Either a collective or something dead and he hates how much that weighed on his mind. Shepard died. She was dead. She’d been dead and then years later. Two long years into the last notes of his swan song she’s real again. Her armour in his scope and charging like a meteor.  
Time melts away it means nothing with how they work together. Garrus ignores her new squad except not to hit them. Tries to shut out Shepard so he can finish this, he hopes again that he’ll make it out alive. It seems like he won’t, he’s fallen bleeding, dizzy and dying on the floor sure he may be Archangel now but Shepard looked like both their species’ idea of holy all over again. Shepard is dead but she smiles warmly and makes teasing remarks and helps him over and over.  
Shepard is dead and when he’d signed up to die that first day on Omega he’d desperately hoped that he’d end up by her side.

He can’t decide if he’s the only one who suspects, who knows, who wonders and hopes. The idea of otherness spins through his head, almost worrying. Doesn’t know how to talk about it. Isn’t sure that he can because he’s not suave on the best of days, not good at this personal connection. Garrus hides and tries to perfect weapons so Shepard doesn’t die again and doesn’t come back again because now he’s thinking that young punk he was and will always carry had the right idea about invincibility. Garrus is good at action, knows he’s good but there’s no action to convey that you think you’re in love, that you know they’re fallible and real but you still think they might be undying anyways. That he’s not a religious man but please Shepard please can’t you see that you’re a dead legend guiding us.

He’s taken her off her pedestal now sure, Shepard isn’t perfect, she compromises and misses her shots and has irregular spots and is the absolute worst driver he’s ever met. She drove up a cliff and then rammed a thresher maw in a flying dive she is the worst. She cheats at cards. Can’t dance for shit. Is almost as smooth as him when she flirts. Miranda and the other Cerberus lackeys, a visit to Liara who’s hands have played heavily in this give him details. Shepard is her because of a science project. She’s here because of hard work and enough money that a better, newer Normandy was pocket change.  
He knows this, logically.

Garrus also knows he was there when Sovereign first spoke to her. He’s there on the field when Harbinger does the same. Garrus is always at her side if he’s being frank, he sees more than most of Shepard but when Reapers come crashing down it hammers in how things like this shouldn’t be. He’s there while she sorts through her crews problems from family disputes to the futures of their kind. He’s there to laugh at her ire in a party dress and to stage a prison break. He’s there when a dead race is possessed with wicked golden light in a frantic desire to stop her. Even though Garrus feels guilty when warnings are passed out before they’re on the derelict, when they discover the lost people there. When a panicked scientist whispers about how it warps reality just by being there, guilty that his first and final instinct each time is to look for Shepard he can’t deny it.

The second time feels like it was meant to be the end. When there’s no one left on this ghost ship but Shepard’s carefully curated crew and a free AI. When the suicide run becomes a rescue. When Garrus fumbles and fails and falls into bed with Shepard and lies awake in the aftermath. They fit halfway perfectly in each other’s arms like this, it’s not going to be long before the relay now, and his vestigial spurs are definitely digging into her but Shepard can sleep anywhere. It’s a strange gasp of peace he didn’t know he needed and didn’t think could happen.

His mind is quiet through the frantic firefight. Through the hull breach, through the debris field. His heart barely ticks up when they shoot down the ship that killed destroyed the first Normandy. They plan the minutia of their assault and move forward like the tide.  
His orders as the second team's leader are certain. This is easier than Omega, which isn’t to say it’s easy. He’s not going through the motions. It’s just clarity. He can hear Harbinger on the other end of Shepard’s comms while he waits at the door and nervous energy creeps in his periphery but as soon as she’s there even as seeker swarms swallow their horizon the purpose of motion returns. The crew holds it together too well when they find them. Solemn and quiet but not weeping from stress and Garrus knows most of them are just glorified civilians. She helps them up, sends them back the way they came with Mordin as a single guard. Shepard storms through the collector fields, he wonders if Miranda was right, if she could hold the biotic barrier like Jack does in-between adding new eye holes in collector heads. His team’s distraction is overwhelmed just as she reaches the other side of the door.  
He’s not chosen to hold the line.

Garrus feels guilt again when EDI explains why it looks human and all he can hear all he can see in the monster is Shepard Shepard Shepard. The rest is a background soundtrack until it drops shields just where and when she says to shoot it.

If he’s being honest the rest is still really white noise, the collectors and The Illusive Man’s inane chatter, even her final words on the matter until the fucking thing comes back to life.  
It glares down at them with molten metal eyes he’s seen before.  
Garrus spares one last glance at Shepard, to see them again just in case and pulls his rifle off his shoulder.

**Author's Note:**

> happy n7 day I like my sheps Other and demi-godly


End file.
